Oracle Buys BEA

If you haven't heard by now, Oracle has just acquired BEA for a lot of money. Here's what I'm hoping will come out of the deal, or at least some predictions:

• TopLink dies a horrible death replaced by KODO.
• TopLink Essentials dies a horrible death replaced by KODO core (Apache OpenJPA).
• Oracle OC4J still doesn't do Java EE 5, it's still stuck on Java EE 1.4. It has almost no market share and BEA WebLogic has something like a 33% market share of application servers. Not sure what will happen here...
• JRockit will hopefully die a not so horrible death. JRockit is a full Java SE implementation but it's actually licensed from Sun with some custom patches applied that apparently improve performance. Enough already, if those custom enhancements are really worthwhile, just contribute them to the OpenJDK project already and move on.
• IDEs? Don't know what will happen there, both companies have their own Java IDE which have both failed to gain any significant momentum. To me, 0 + 0 is still 0. Here, please note that I am talking about market share and not the quality of these products

KODO was acquired by BEA which donated the core bits to Apache which formed the OpenJPA project. OpenJPA is now used by WebSphere, Geronimo and WebLogic. Having OpenJPA standard in Glassfish would be nice but even if Oracle decides to move forward with KODO, it still doesn't mean Sun would decide to dump the TopLink Essentials code that Oracle contributed to Glassfish. Well, here's hoping, see my previous blog post on TopLink Essentials on why I think this matters.